05/28/2025
Before country music had its first golden age, before it echoed across the hollers and highways of America, a quiet man with a guitar helped shape its sound. Yet few know his name.
Lesley Riddle was born in Burnsville, North Carolina, in 1905, in the rugged mountains where ballads carried more truth than newspapers. When he was eight, his family moved to Kingsport, Tennessee. There, his life was shaped as much by hardship as it was by harmony. A factory accident as a teenager took his right leg. Then a family dispute cost him two fingers on his picking hand. But instead of silencing him, these tragedies carved out a new kind of musician.
Kingsport became his stage, and he found himself playing alongside blues legends like Blind Lemon Jefferson and Brownie McGhee. But it was a chance meeting in the late 1920s that quietly rewrote country music history.
A.P. Carter, of the famed Carter Family, heard Riddle play at a local music gathering and was transfixed. The two struck up an unlikely partnership. Together, they traveled through communities across the South, with Riddle often acting as the ears, picking up songs, melodies, and lyrics that Carter couldn’t catch. Riddle had an uncanny musical memory and could translate what he heard into guitar arrangements that the Carter Family later recorded.
He wasn’t just a song collector. He was a teacher. Maybelle Carter, matriarch of country music herself, credited Riddle with showing her the fingerpicking style that became known as the Carter Scratch, a technique that later influenced legends like Chet Atkins and Doc Watson.
In 1930, he traded one of his original songs, “Lonesome for You,” to the Carters in exchange for an artificial leg. But due to Jim Crow laws and the racial divide of the era, Riddle was never publicly credited or invited to perform alongside the Carter Family. He remained in the background, a ghostwriter for a genre that rarely welcomed Black musicians.
Eventually, he walked away from music entirely and settled in Rochester, New York. Decades passed before Maybelle Carter mentioned his name to folklorist Mike Seeger during the 1960s folk revival. Seeger tracked Riddle down, recorded his music, and brought him back into the spotlight, briefly, for performances at the Newport Folk Festival and the Smithsonian.
Lesley Riddle returned to North Carolina near the end of his life and died in Asheville in 1979. Though his name never lit up marquees, his fingerprints are all over the foundation of country music. In 2008, his story came full circle with a stage production in his hometown of Burnsville, finally giving him a voice he was too often denied.
